Power-sharing and its side effects
Portrait on the ETH Zurich news blog introducing research on the unintended consequences of corporate and liberal power-sharing arrangements.
This feature portrait on the ETH Zurich news blog (March 2021) presented my postdoctoral research on the side effects of ethnic power-sharing. I explained the distinction between corporate power-sharing (which explicitly allocates positions by group identity, as Belgium does for its Walloon minority) and liberal power-sharing, which uses proportional systems to create inclusive incentives without ethnic guarantees. My main finding is that corporate inclusion generates "inclusion envy" among groups left outside the arrangement: the excluded feel their marginalisation more acutely precisely because others have been formally recognised. I also showed that forcing majorities into power-sharing arrangements in African contexts increases the likelihood of coups, as disaffected elites exploit majority resentment to dismantle inclusive systems.